Make a picture transparent

Great pictures can make a big difference in your document, but sometimes you want the picture to be lighter so it doesn’t fight with text. You can do that by adjusting the transparency of the picture.

Picture with a transparency of 70%

The bad news is that you have to take a few extra steps to make your whole picture transparent. The key is to put your photo inside a shape first, and then change the transparency. Here’s how it works:

Make part of a picture transparent

You can make one color in a picture transparent using the built-in transparency feature. A word of caution, as areas that seem to be a single color (for example, green leaves) might actually be made up of a range of subtle color variations and so you might not get the effect you want.

Click Set Transparent Color, and when the pointer changes, click the color you want to make transparent.

In the picture below, the leaves are composed of several colors of green and consequently only part of the leaves are made transparent, making it difficult to see the transparent effect. Repeating the process with a different color, will remove the transparency from the first color. To remove the color changes, click Reset Picture in the Adjust group.

Note When you print pictures with transparent areas the color is the same as the paper. On your screen or a web site, the transparent areas are the same color as the background.

Tip If you have an image editing app, you can use it to make your picture transparent. Then save the picture in a format that preserves transparency information (such as a Portable Network Graphics (.png) file), and insert the file into your Office document.